Growth Forecasts Cut “The economy is losing steam, but is not in a recessionary state,” Minister Chu Tzer-ming of the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics told a mid-February news conference. He reported that DGBAS is now forecasting GDP growth for Taiwan of 2.27% this year, down from the 2.41% it was predicting last…
2019 Lantern Festival Spotlights Pingtung This year’s national lantern festival was hosted by the southern county of Pingtung and held in the national scenic area of Dapeng Bay. The event highlighted the foods, products, and landscape of Pingtung. Normally the main lantern features the animal on the Chinese zodaic for which the year is named…
U.S. Senators Invite Tsai to Address Congress A group of U.S. senators has called for President Tsai Ing-wen to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress — a proposal that drew a characteristically cautious, non-committal response from the Taiwanese leader. The senators said having the Taiwanese leader speak to Congress would be consistent with…
Part of President Tsai Ing-wen’s vision for the New Southbound Policy was for Taiwan to host an annual conference of thought leaders from the target countries to provide guidance regarding regional concerns and how the New Southbound Policy could best address them. Organizing the event – to be held each year on October 11 and…
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when Taiwan needed support in the international community to hold onto its seat in the United Nations, one of its most effective means of winning friends abroad was through agriculture. Numerous teams of agricultural technicians were dispatched to developing countries, especially in Africa, to teach farmers techniques for increasing…
Another Chapter in NTU Presidency Saga It appeared in December that the prolonged standoff between National Taiwan University and the Ministry of Education over the NTU faculty’s election of economist Kuan Chung-ming as university president had finally been resolved. Education Minister Yeh Jiunn-rong, who was moved over from the Interior Ministry specifically to bring the…
Western medicine was introduced to Taiwan a century and a half ago by foreign missionaries such as George Leslie Mackay, and American doctors in the 1970s and 1980s helped Taiwan develop a vaccine to overcome the scourge of hepatitis B. Now that Taiwan has built its own strong foundation in healthcare and public health, it…
In the first two-plus years of the New Southbound Policy, the number of students from the target countries enrolled in Taiwan’s colleges and universities increased by over one-third to reach 41,000. At the same time, more than 7,000 young Taiwanese per year head for the New Southbound countries either to take formal courses of study…
In addition to the New Southbound Policy, one of the central initiatives of the Tsai Ing-wen administration has been the “5+2 Innovative Industry” program focusing on cutting edge industrial sectors. The goal of forging links between those two policies was assigned to the Ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the five flagship projects under…
Su Tseng-chang Takes Office as New Premier Following Premier Lai Ching-te’s resignation due to the poor showing of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in the November 2018 municipal elections, President Tsai tapped a senior DPP leader, Su Tseng-chang, to succeed him. The President told the media that she selected Su because he possesses three…
